Newly widowed man wrestles with grief as the truth spills out

Drive past a funeral home in Chicago, and you often catch a glimpse of them: big, middle-aged men uncomfortable with grief.

They tend to cluster on the sidewalks, poured into ill-fitting suits, thick necks confined by collars and ties, cigarette smoke clouded above their heads. If you're driving by, or you turn your head as you sit on your bus on Western Avenue or maybe Belmont Avenue, you have a brief vista of this very male way of mourning — the isolation, the discomfort, the innate inability to remain still. These men pace on their rude little patch of sidewalk, trying to process how to grieve. Meanwhile, the city carries on without them, unaffected.

Such a man, whose name is Edward Carr, makes up the entire cast of characters of Neil LaBute's "Wrecks," an 80-minute monologue that makes you feel as if LaBute has written an entirely uncharacteristic play — something more in tune with the Irish writer Conor McPherson — until you eventually discover you've been in LaBute's wheelhouse all along. It just took awhile for the guts to spill. To say the how and why would ruin everything. Fear not. Read on.

Mr. Carr, who is played in this Chicago premiere at the Profiles Theatre by the redoubtable Chicago actor John Judd — a large man who looks and acts just like the bereaved you can see on those Chicago sidewalks — has lost his beloved wife to cancer.

We quickly grasp that he has no idea what to do with this rush of emotion, and certainly no idea how to reconcile the formalities of death with the intensity of feeling. We come to see that this man, who tells us that he successfully runs a kind of "Rent a Wreck" car-rental business, came out of nothing, and, to a large extent, the woman who lies dead was his savior.

Carr has to talk, of course, and it's not entirely clear whom he is addressing. We are told that the eulogy for his wife will have to be delivered tomorrow. Perhaps we are fellow mourners, paying our early respects. Perhaps we are figments of his imagination. I kept thinking last Friday night that it was as if I'd stuck my head out the window of the No. 77-Belmont bus and listened in on one of those conversations on the sidewalk. Carr is eulogizing, processing, confessing, despairing and, as we all have to do in such circumstances, grasping the way personal grief always plays out against a backdrop of total normalcy in the world beyond. As Karen Carpenter used to sing, "Don't they know it's the end of the world?"

Not that Carr would listen to the Carpenters. "Wrecks" is, according to the playwright, set in the Midwest, as is often the case with his plays; he keeps things sparse and universal, allowing people to impose their own notions of place. But it's not hard to glean that LaBute, here, is really writing about Chicago. Judd, who knows his character, is playing a very recognizable Chicagoan in director Jason Gerace's simple but slow-burning production.

"Wrecks" is an interesting piece in many ways, but it really is a further entry in LaBute's long-running portrait of the Middle Class American Male, a species that in his plays is known for bad behavior and, especially later in life, a consummate inability to cope with states of personal duress.

"Wrecks" was seen in New York and Los Angeles in 2006-2007, with Ed Harris in the title role. Judd is a bigger man, with broader shoulders, and he is greatly aided here by the intimacy of Profiles' Alley Stage, which functions very much as a cage in this production.

Judd, who talks and sweats and prowls and then talks some more — his character's truths spilling out slowly as we seem to gain his trust — acts like a big man whose world has collapsed and who is trying to understand a new and seemingly hellish landscape and his place therein. It is a formidable performance and, for the record, a great benefit of this longtime fringe company's new status as an Equity company. We get to see far too little of our greatly experienced actors in such environments, and "Wrecks" is an ideal showcase for Judd— unplugged. There is nothing sentimental about this piece, its setting notwithstanding. You are unlikely to leave liking the man, given what he eventually coughs up. You might feel that everything was merely a come-on to motivate a final, shocking revelation. But although such issues are most certainly LaBute-ian — he is ever obsessed with the horrors and dysfunction that fester under our skin and unable to let poetry or feeling go unanswered for long — that's not the main achievement in this small but potent monologue.

Even men with terrible secrets can love, and if you benefit from love, you risk eventually losing it, and losing what has kept everything in balance. If you look Judd in the eye — and you can't avoid that, really — you might catch a glimpse of the end.